Francesco Risso Is Leaving Marni

This morning, Marni parent group OTB announced that Francesco Risso will be leaving the helm of the brand after almost ten years. A successor has not been announced, but the news comes on the heels of several changes at Renzo Rossi’s company, with Simone Bellotti joining Jil Sander and Glenn Martens taking over as creative director at Maison Margiela.

Risso was appointed at Marni as a relative unknown in the industry in 2016 and took over directly from the house’s founder Consuelo Castiglioni. Risso’s time at the label has been marked by extraordinarily creative collections that were filled with uninhibited fantasy. He challenged commerciality with whimsical, wild designs and runway pieces that bent minds and captured hearts. To Risso, the craft of fashion was everything–scultpural dresses made from paper flower cutouts, knits and shoes that looked like they were stolen off the back of The Lorax, and handpainted, often upcycled fabrics with spectacular abstract and patchworked prints.

Risso’s process was often that of a conceptual artist more than a fashion designer, though his construction and tailoring more than proved his worth in the industry. When concepting his Fall 2024 collection, he covered his entire studio in white paper and instructed his team to completely shut out any outside images, sounds, distractions, any references of any kind. For Fall 2020, Risso exclusively used scraps of various fabric and toile to patchwork every piece together with unfinished seams and nonlinear stitches. He also took his bow for that show dressed like a bunny on an acid trip. But beyond Risso’s conceptual work, he understood how to communicate to a new generation of fashion kids, designing collectable, off-beat pieces that stood out in stores amidst a sea of sameness (and ultra high prices) in the luxury market over the last few years. As a friend said over text this morning, perhaps his greatest contribution to fashion during his tenure was, at its purest, being someone “who made clothes FUN.”

While we don’t yet know where Risso is headed next, if anywhere, there’s much to celebrate from his ten years at Marni. The clothes were magical, his talent was ultra-bright, but it was the wild spirit Risso brought to the brand that was truly everything.